Cortina d’Ampezzo (Italy) (AFP) – Mikaela Shiffrin has one last chance to end her Olympic medal drought at the Milan-Cortina Games with Wednesday’s slalom, the discipline in which the American skier has dominated in recent years. The most successful skier of all time with 108 World Cup wins and an eight-time world champion, Shiffrin had come into the Winter Olympics in such great form that she looked near certain to claim at least a medal.
But Shiffrin has been out of sorts and now heads into the slalom at real risk of leaving northern Italy with a repeat of her Beijing Olympics disaster four years ago. Shiffrin’s last Olympic medal was the giant slalom title at the Pyeongchang Games in 2018, an eternity for a ski racer of her talent and her record in other competitions.
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The 30-year-old tried to put a positive spin on failing to even crack the top 10 in Sunday’s giant slalom, finishing 11th and three tenths of a second off the podium — but that was in a discipline in which she hasn’t won a race since December 2023. “To be here now, just in touch with the fastest women, that is huge. I am proud of that,” insisted Shiffrin after finishing nearly a second slower than Italy’s double gold heroine Federica Brignone. “My mentality was not matching the day,” she said, but for the slalom, “I will try to handle it differently in my head.”
So far, Shiffrin hasn’t performed anywhere near her best in what has been a difficult Olympics for the USA ski team, dominated by Lindsey Vonn’s horror crash and leg break in the downhill race which opened proceedings in Cortina d’Ampezzo. Since her last giant slalom victory, Shiffrin has only reached the podium twice in the discipline, but the same cannot be said of the slalom where she has laid waste to the competition this year.
Shiffrin has won seven of this term’s World Cup slalom races and finished just 0.14 seconds behind winner Camille Rast in Kranjska Gora, so her dismal display in the team combined was hard to explain. Set up perfectly by Breezy Johnson being fastest in the first leg downhill, Shiffrin looked to have a gold medal all but secured before she somehow finished 15th fastest in her slalom run and cost the USA a medal. For context, the last time Shiffrin finished that low down in a slalom — leaving aside races she failed to finish — was way back in March 2012 when she was still a teenager in her first full World Cup season.
Her performances in Cortina have left Shiffrin with a huge weight of expectation resting on her ahead of the slalom, as a repeat of Beijing looms large. Shiffrin had six chances to claim a medal in China but had the worst two weeks of her career, failing to even finish three of the races and crashing out in the first run of both the slalom and giant slalom. Now everything rests on this year’s slalom showdown, with the risk that skiing superstars Shiffrin and Vonn both leave Italy empty-handed.
© 2024 AFP
